Menu

An interesting question, ''What is the value of a Galleon?''

I know that Ms. J.K.Rowling provided the approximation of the value of a Galleon (“about 5 pounds, but the exchange rate varies”), in an interview, but I think it is off a tad. This is not Ms. Rowling’s fault, but it is the fault of Scholastic Books. The price tag on my copy of Quidditch Through the Ages, states that the book sells for “$3.99, or 14 Sickles and 3 Knuts”. As a math teacher, looking for anything to interest my students, I made a math problem out of this. Perhaps people might appreciate the “arithmancy” a little more.

Dr. Joshua C. Sasmor

From Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, chapter 9:

Hagrid helped Harry pile some of it [Harry’s money] into a bag.

“The gold ones are Galleons,” he explained. “Seventeen silver Sickles to a Galleon and twenty-nine Knuts to a Sickle, it’s easy enough.”

While I haven’t taken a math class since 1987, for some reason while I was studying for my Ph.D. I got into creating 3D vector graphics for pleasure, so I looked up equations for plotting points in space and projecting them onto a 2D surface.

There is no software that could read my thesis and tell me “logical fallacy on line 656” or “undefined term used in ambiguous context on line 4203”. So, when my C++ program compiled without generating any errors, I felt validated and comforted.